Specificity of verbal description of pain by patients with cognitive disorders with vascular genesis

As a part of Russian Science Foundation project “Verbalization of pain and anxiety in patients with cognitive impairment caused by vascular diseases: The linguistic analysis and development of diagnostic tools”, new data were obtained in 2025 on the characteristics of pain descriptions in poststroke patients and patients with chronic cerebral ischemia. Based on a detailed neuropsychological examination and the patients’ speech assessment, the article identifies and describes the most significantly affected cognitive domains. We collected samples of free pain descriptions in the study groups and found that the patients with predominantly memory impairments reported their pain more accurately than the patients with impaired verbal thinking, regulatory and attentional impairments. Depending on the structure of the cognitive deficit, the article classifies and describes the main difficulties in using the questionnaires. Based on the identified characteristics, we developed an original Russian-language diagnostic tool (the Pain Questionnaire for patients with cognitive impairment), which underwent a procedure of linguistic validation and testing. We identified which of the traditionally used tools for pain diagnosis in clinical practice can be effectively used in patients with cognitive impairment of vascular genesis.